Some Special Thanks
About a month ago, a little game called The Order: 1886 finally hit store shelves. Its release marks the culmination of my past 4 years at Ready At Dawn, which were largely devoted to developing the core rendering and engine technology that was ultimately used for the game. It’s also a major milestone for me personally, as it’s the first project that I’ve worked on full-time from start to finish. I’m of course immensely proud of what our team has managed to accomplish, and I feel tremendously lucky to go to work every day with such a talented and dedicated group of people.
My work wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many individuals both internal and external to our studio, but unfortunately there’s just too many people to list in a “special thanks” section of the credits. So instead of that, I’ve made my own special thanks section! But before you read it, please know that this list (like everything else on my blog) only represents my own personal feelings and experiences, and does not represent the rest of the team or my company as a whole. And now, without further ado…
From SCE:
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Tobias Berghoff, Steven Tovey, Matteo Scapuzzi, Benjamin Segovia, Vince Diesi, Chris Carty, Nicolas Serres, and everyone else at the Advanced Technology Group. These fine folks have developed a fantastic suite of debugging and performance tools for the PS4, and thus played a huge part in making the PS4 the incredible development platform that it is.
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Dave Simpson, Cort Stratton, Cedric Lallian, and everyone else at the ICE Team for making the best graphics API that I’ve ever used.
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Geoff Audy, Elizabeth Baumel, Peter Young, and everyone else at Foster City and elsewhere that provided valuable tools and developer support.
From the graphics community:
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Andrew Lauritzen for providing all of his valuable research on shadows and deferred rendering. His work with VSM and SDSM formed the basis of our shadowing tech in The Order, and his amazing presentation + demo on deferred rendering back in 2010 helped set the standard for state-of-the art in rendering tech for games. Also I’ll go ahead and thank him preemptively for (hopefully) forgiving me for thanking him here, even though I promised him last year at GDC that I would thank him in the credits.
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Stephen Hill, whose excellent articles and presentations have always inspired me to strive for the next level of quality when sharing my own work.
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Steve McAuley, who along with Mr. Hill is responsible for cultivating what is arguably the best collection of material year after year: the physically based shading course at SIGGRAPH. I’m very thankful to them for inviting us to participate in 2013, and then helping myself and Dave to deliver our presentation and course notes.
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Naty Hoffman, Timothy Lottes, Adrian Bentley, Sébastien Legarde, Johan Andersson, James McLaren, Brian Karis, Peter-Pike Sloan, Nathan Reed, Christer Ericson, Angelo Pesce, Michał Iwanicki, Christian Gyrling, Aras Pranckevičius, Michal Valient, Bart Wronski, Jasmin Patry, Michal Drobot, Jorge Jimenez, Padraic Hennessy, and anyone else who was kind enough to talk shop over a drink at GDC or SIGGRAPH.
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Anybody who has every given presentations, written articles, or otherwise contributed to the vast wealth of public knowledge concerning computer graphics. I’m really proud of the culture of openness and sharing among the graphics community, and also very grateful for it. We often stood on the shoulders of giants when creating the tech for our game, and we couldn’t have achieved we did if without drawing from the insights and techniques that were generously shared by other developers and researchers.
From Ready at Dawn:
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Everyone that I worked with on the Tools and Engine team: Nick Blasingame, Joe Ferfecki, Gabriel Sassone, Sean Flynn, Simone Kulczycki, Scott Murray, Robin Green, Brett Dixon, Joe Schutte, David Neubelt, Alex Clark, Garret Foster, Tom Plunket, Aaron Halstead, Jeremy Nikolai, and Jamie Hayes. If you appreciate anything at all about the tech of The Order, then please think of these people! Also I need to give Garret an extra-special thanks for letting myself and Dave take all of the credit for his work on the material pipeline.
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Our art director Nathan Phail-Liff, who not only directs a phenomenal group of artists but also had a major hand in shaping the direction of the tech that was developed for the project.
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Anthony Vitale, who leads the best damn environment art team in the business. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check out their art dump on the polycount forums!
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Ru Weerasuriya, Andrea Pessino, and Dider Malenfant for starting this amazing company, and for giving me an opportunity to work there.
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Everyone else at Ready At Dawn that worked on the project with me. I don’t know if I can ever get used to overwhelming amount of sheer talent and dedication that you can have at a game studio, and the people that I worked with had that in spades. I look forward to making many more beautiful things with them in the future!
If you read through all of this, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. It means a lot to me that the people listed above get their due credit, and so I hope that my humble little blog post has enough reach to give them some of the recognition that they rightfully deserve.
Comments:
Thank you for not erasing me from history.
#### [GamingPicks](https://gamingpicks.wordpress.com/ "videogamesvideos@gmail.com") -
Thank you and all the people at Ready at Dawn, I honestly loved the game. And visually (technical and artistically) is among the best I’ve played on my almost 30 years of gaming. Congratulations!